MDustan

Hi, Are there any future plans to support servo drives using the SERCOS protocol over EtherCAT? We have a strong desire to use the beckhoff AX5000 series of servo drive in conjunction with a delta tau controller. What is the current limitation for using these drives is it a delta tau issue or the Acontis software stack that does not support the SERCOS protocol? I have experimented with the combination and found that the SOE parameters are accessible in the IDE and EC engineer. However on attempting to move the drive through it's state machine errors are encountered at the pre-op to safe-op which is where the majority on the SOE initialisation tasks occur.

I've noticed a change in behaviour in the way home commands are executed in our project. We have moved to EtherCAT from a UBUS setup. Using the call "home FLHXMOTOR, FLHYMOTOR, FRHXMOTOR, FRHYMOTOR;" Used to home all motors simultaneously. The same call now homes each motor consecutively which adds significant time since we have 19axis to home. Is this expected behaviour for an EtherCAT system? We have moved from IDE2, 465, UbUS to an IDE4, LX86 setup

Hi Steve, I installed the patch, this had the effect of moving the same error further down the list of our script files. I guess the GPG file size limit was increased in the patch any chance this limit could be opened up further by a significant amount?

I have had success with the following devices on the CK3E Acontis Stack: AKD-P02407-NBCC (running in Torque Mode, also mapped the servo drive brake control over the network) AKD-C01007-CBEC (power distribution module for AKD distributed drives) AKD-N00307-DFEC (AKD Distributed drive, Torque Mode) AKD-N00607-DFEC (AKD Distributed drive, Torque Mode) AKD-N01207-DFEC (AKD Distributed drive, Torque Mode) Kistler Type 5074A - 4 channel industrial charge amplifier, limited to 1khz bus frequency.

I have a project that worked correctly on IDE 2 I am now trying to download it to my CK3E which I have upgraded to firmware 2.4.1.2. I believe I need IDE 4 with this flavour of Firmware, I am very keen to test out the new features delivered with this software firmware combination. Having installed the IDE and configured the EtherCAT network from within the IDE, which is a nice feature, I went to download my project. It builds with no errors but on download I get the following error: Error : ( Preprocessing Error) GPG file size exceeded : on string ("") Could someone shed a little more light on this error? Is there a fundamental change between the IDE's that would cause this error?

Attaching a slave to the network seems to fix things.

Hi, I attempted to upgrade the firmware of my CK3E-1410 to version 2.4.1.2 I believe I followed the instructions to the letter, however when connecting to the card through the IDE and entering the system setup window I get the error: "Cannot start set master state to INIT (Result = ERROR: Invalid state (0x9811000e))" Typing ecatreset into the terminal does not resolve this issue. I tried to downgrade the card using the reverse process but on completion I still have the same error: "Cannot start set master state to INIT (Result = ERROR: Invalid state (0x9811000e))" I can provide a dump of the contents of the serial window on boot up if that helps.

If it occurs again i'll gather the relevant info so far I have only seen it once.

Sorry for the delayed response. Over the past few weeks we have uncovered much of what has been suggested above. The Task Manager bug added to the confusion which led me to miss the fact that Sys.RtiIntTime included the servo execution time. There are several issues with the CK3E which I have yet to figure out answers too these are: POSIX mode has broken the way some of our background CPLC's execute, running the same code in the RTI CPLC fixes the issue. We only have one script PLC so according to the manual the 465 and POSIX flow charts should reduce to the same thing. However I have been informed the POSIX flow chart does not reveal the whole picture. There is about a 0.75Hz beating to the RX and TX times this trickles through to the Servo and RtiInt times. This seems to be linked to ecat[0].DCClockdiff interestingly the DC Clock on the boards we have running the Etherlab stack is very solid and does not exhibit this beating. This is not the case when running the Acontis stack.

Setup 465 UMAC Hardware 19axis of motion 32 encoder channels 48 analogue channels macro ring 3 x 65e dig IO cards CK3E Hardware 19Axis of motion 4 x AKD-P etherCAT servo drives 2 x AKD-C etherCAT distributed power units 15 x AKD-N etherCAT distributed servo drives 4 x 8 axis etherCAT quadrature encoder boards our own design 1 x Beckhoff PLC master/slave device with chain of IO on it's own etherCAT master network In both cases we are not using segmentation mode, we do not use look ahead, we are not running foreground PLC programs and we do not use the inbuilt kinematics. We have an rtiCPLC which we have figured out is scheduled to run in the RTI interrupt but runs on the background Core. We have an execution timer in this code we would expect this code to take approx 100microseconds to execute on a 465cpu it seems to be taking approx 180microseconds to run on the CK3E. Assuming this 180microseconds is part of the overall 500microseconds for the RTI execution. This suggests 320 is split between move planning, motor safety and status checks and coordinate system updates.

Hi, I am looking into moving from the 465 to the CK3E cpu card primary reason is the etherCAT functionality. Worryingly the execution time of my RTI and Servo has drastically increased on the CK3E so much so I have had to drop from 2.2kHz servo frequency to 1kHz. I understand the read and write of etherCAT information now occurs in the Servo which may explain the increase from 20 to 300 microseconds execution time. What I was not expecting was an increase from 20 to 500 microseconds in the RTI. Which as far as I can tell is running very similar code. Should I be expecting this sort of performance drop between the two cards?

Hi, I left my IDE open and talking to my CK3E over the lunch hour and on my return I noticed the following error reported in the IDE terminal. " Message from syslogd@ubuntu at Aug 25 19:19:04 ... kernel:BUG: spinlock recursion on CPU#1, rcu_sched/7 Message from syslogd@ubuntu at Aug 25 19:19:04 ... kernel: lock: 0xbffd9880, .magic: dead4ead, .owner: rcu_sched/7, .owner_cpu: -1 " Could anyone shed light on the significance of this error?

Hi Brad I semi expected that to be the answer. My PDO is currently 600bytes most I will be able to get it down too is 500bytes and that is pushing it to the bare minimum. I guess that leads me to the next question do you have any plans to move to a more powerful arm processor in the future?

Hi I've been working on moving the control architecture of one of our machines onto EtherCAT. To give you an idea of the size of the network we have 19axis of motion, 32 force channels, 32 incremental encoder measurement channels, and a lot of dig IO. Having read the manuals and from assembling the hardware, I've noticed that our Servo execution time is a lot higher than it would have been previously on our 465 UMAC backplane configuration. I am using a CK3E CPU running at 2kHz servo frequency and the Servo code is taking about 200microseconds to execute utilising 25-30% of the available cpu. This is greater perhaps double what we would see on our old configuration. I understand the cyclic input and output transfers of EtherCAT IO is now happening in the Servo which accounts for this increase. Do you have a feel for how much time it takes to process for instance a single 32bit input variable? Also are there any tips on how to make things more efficient? Is it better to map two 16 bit inputs or combine them as one 32bit? This increase in servo execution time is causing our RTI to drop out with bsy/err as we run out of CPU time. It is possible we can run at 1kHz servo frequency but first I would prefer to optimise what we have before resorting to that. Sorry for the long post.

The patch to the IDE 2.2.1.25 fixed the issue.

Hi, I have a project that fails to build when communicating to a 32 axis CK3E ethercat CPU card. Interestingly it builds fine when I am communicating with a 16 axis version of the same CPU. The build error I am receiving is attached. BuilError.txt